HC hearing may conclude today
MUMBAI: Students of FYJC may soon know where they stand. The Bombay high court has said it would complete on Wednesday the hearing of the PIL challenging the Maharashtra government’s newly introduced percentile method for admissions to first year junior college.
Senior counsel Rajni Iyer, who was appearing for the Association of ICSE Schools of Maharashtra, requested the court for a speedy disposal of the matter.
On Tuesday, advocate Mihir Desai, appearing for the Parents Teachers Association (PTA) which was supporting the government’s controversial move, spoke for the first time during the hearing and summarised succinctly in a few minutes the crux of matter. Till this point, the government pleader had been labouring with the justifications for the state’s decision.
Desai said the essential question before the court was to see whether the new formula was “so perverse or so grossly in favour of the SSC students as to merit interference by the court’’. He said it was not as if a SSC student with 60% marks was depriving a CBSE student with a score of 95%.
He said the main issue was whether the “normalisation process’’ was desirable and whether it was the correct method.
Members of the PTA forum—mostly parents of SSC students—were present in court. Desai said that over the years, as admissions were based on merit and percentages obtained by students across the boards, there was an “inherent bias in favour of the ICSE and CBSE board students’’.
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